Chris Johnston Poet Free verse

Before the first name

Not from theorem or throne
did it begin,
but from a shiver
that did not yet know it was afraid.

A tightening in the dark.
A bruise in the silence.
Something leaned toward something else
without language,
without permission.

The deep did not speak.
It listened.

In that listening
hands were already imagined,
cupped, empty,
waiting for warmth that had not yet learned its own weight.

The first fire did not blaze.
It remembered.
It remembered a body
that had never been broken
and a hunger that would one day ache
for bread, for skin, for return.

Out of the long unlit waters
rose no god crowned in certainty,
but a tremor
that would later become a child
crying into air too wide for its lungs.

And the stars came
not as architects
but as witnesses,
leaning close,
burning with the patience of those
who know they will outlast every funeral
and still grieve.

The origin was not clean.
It was wet.
It was crowded.
It throbbed with near-misses and almosts,
with forms that tried and failed
and tried again,
because failure had not yet learned shame.

Bones were rehearsed
in the memory of waves.
Blood practiced its color
in iron tides.
Eyes learned darkness
before they ever learned light.

And when at last a voice rose
from the long labor of matter,
it did not ask,
Why am I?
It asked,
Where are the others?

So the universe bent,
not toward perfection,
but toward company.

Even now,
when we bury our dead
under names that erode like cliffs,
the origin does not retreat.
It kneels with us.

It is in the warmth
left on an empty pillow.
In the way hands linger
after letting go.
In the breath that stutters,
then continues,
out of stubborn love.

No final silence owns us.
No ending seals the source.

What began as a trembling
still moves through our ribs,
and what was born without certainty
refuses extinction.

The first darkness
still remembers us.
And we,
broken, brief,
carry it forward
each time we choose
to touch,
to speak,
to stay.

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